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This site is the inspiration of a former reporter/photographer for one of New England's largest daily newspapers and for various magazines. The intent is to direct readers to interesting political articles, and we urge you to visit the source sites. Any comments may be noted on site or directed to KarisChaf at gmail.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

A self-described tech guy at heart, Potter relished the chance to
study the jammers. It turned out that, among other problems, they
weren’t emitting powerful enough radio waves along the threat
frequencies—those that carried much of the city’s mobile traffic. Once
the necessary tweaks were made, Potter was elated to witness the
immediate, lifesaving results on the streets of Kirkuk, where several of
his friends had been maimed or killed. “To see an IED detonate safely
behind our convoy—that was a win for me,” he says. It was so thrilling,
in fact, that when Potter returned from Iraq in 2008, he dedicated
himself to becoming one of the Army’s first new specialists in spectrum
warfare—the means by which a military seizes and controls the
electromagnetic radiation that makes all wireless communication
possible.

It is well known that America’s military dominates both the air and
the sea. What’s less celebrated is that the US has also dominated the
spectrum, a feat that is just as critical to the success of operations.
Communications, navigation, battlefield logistics, precision
munitions—all of these depend on complete and unfettered access to the
spectrum, territory that must be vigilantly defended from enemy
combatants. Having command of electromagnetic waves allows US forces to
operate drones from a hemisphere away, guide cruise missiles inland from
the sea, and alert patrols to danger on the road ahead. Just as
important, blocking enemies from using the spectrum is critical to
hindering their ability to cause mayhem, from detonating roadside bombs
to organizing ambushes. As tablet computers and semiautonomous robots
proliferate on battlefields in the years to come, spectrum dominance
will only become more critical. Without clear and reliable access to the
electromagnetic realm, many of America’s most effective weapons simply
won’t work.

The Pentagon failed to foresee how much the wireless revolution would alter warfare.

Yet despite the importance of this crucial resource, America’s grip
on the spectrum has never been more tenuous. Insurgencies and rogue
nations cannot hope to match our multibillion-dollar expenditures on
aircraft carriers and stealth bombers, but they are increasingly able to
afford the devices necessary to wage spectrum warfare, which are
becoming cheaper and more powerful at the same exponential pace as all
electronics. “Now anybody can go to a store and buy equipment for
$10,000 that can mimic our capability,” says Robert Elder, a retired Air
Force lieutenant general who today is a research professor at George
Mason University. Communications jammers are abundant on global markets
or can be assembled from scratch using power amplifiers and other
off-the-shelf components. And GPS spoofers, with the potential to
disrupt everything from navigation to drones, are simple to construct
for anyone with a modicum of engineering expertise.

Stateless actors aren’t the only—or even most troubling—challenge to
America’s spectrum dominance. The greater an opponent’s size and wealth,
the more electromagnetic trouble it can cause. A nation like China, for
example, has the capability to stage elaborate electronic assaults that
could result in nightmare scenarios on the battlefield: radios that
abruptly fall silent in the thick of combat, drones that plummet from
the sky, smart bombs that can’t find their targets. The US may very well
never engage in a head-to-head shooting war in the Far East, but the
ability to effectively control the spectrum is already becoming a new
type of arms race, one that is just as volatile as the ICBM race during
the Cold War—and one that can have just as big an impact on global
diplomacy.

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